The IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) information center has built-in functionality to help you quickly find and print information. Have you played around with the icons in the information center? If you are like me, when you want to find information you do not usually explore the user interface to see all of the functionality that is offered. You just try to find what you are looking for and then call it a day. To save you time when you are searching for information and make your search results more meaningful, here are a few things you should know about using the IBM Business Process Manager Information Center:

You can personalize the information center by narrowing the search scope.

You can show search results in the table of contents (TOC).

You can print selected topics.

Search scope

The IBM Business Process Manager V8.5 Information Center contains a lot of information, so narrowing down the search scope is a good idea to retrieve the specific content that you are looking for. The IBM Business Process Manager V8.5 Information Center includes documentation for the following products and components:

IBM Integration Designer

IBM Process Designer

IBM Process Center

IBM Process Server

IBM Process Portal

IBM Business Monitor

When you search the information center, all of the topics in the Navigation window are searched, which generates a lot of search results. To trim down the results, you can narrow your search scope to a particular set of topics by creating a search list.

For example, say that you are working with IBM Process Designer and you want to learn more about business objects. If you type "business objects" in the search field and click Go, you retrieve 500 results.

Retrieving 500 hits is not particularly helpful. If you change the scope to include only topics on IBM Process Designer, your search results are more meaningful. When you create a Process Designer search scope, you retrieve only 29 results. Scoping your search results definitely helps you find what you are looking for faster. The latest search scope that you create persists each time you launch the information center; so remember that when you start a new search. This feature works in most browsers, however in some browsers (for example, Konqueror and Safari), the save search scope function is not supported.

To create a search scope, follow these steps:

Click Scope and then select Show only the following topics.

Click New and name the search scope.

Select the topics that you want to include in the search. Click OK.

Make sure that the search scope is selected and click OK. You now see your search scope beside Scope in the information center.

Show me where you are in the table of contents

When you search for information, the navigation window shows the search results instead of the table of contents. It is easy to get lost in the search results. So, if you want to see the table of contents again, click the Show in Table of Contents icon. In this example, we want to see where the Shared business objects topic is in the table of contents.

Now we know that this topic is under Creating business objects.

Print the selected topic

Sometimes it is helpful to print information. We all know how important it is to save trees, so it is ideal to print only the information that you need. You can print topics in two ways:

You can select the Print topics icon to the right of Contents and then select Print selected topic.

You can select the Print Page icon in the upper-right corner of the topic.

I hope that these tips come in handy as you use the IBM Business Process Manager Information Center. Feel free to click other icons to see what other functionality is available within the information center.

Recently, I encountered a situation where testing in a new IBM Business Process Manager Version 7.5.1 Fix Pack 1 environment uncovered an out-of-memory issue with the SOAPConnectorCacheData class. The SOAPConnectorCacheData class is basically used to improve the performance of the main web service connector by caching many fields (wsdlURL, serviceName, portName, operationName, parser, definition, wsdlMetaDataContext).

Heap dumps from testing consistently showed the following structure with a huge linked list of Teamworks SOAPConnectorCacheData:

JR42697 introduces a new cache for WSDL objects: <wsdl-cache-size>...</wsdl-cache-size>

This fix is included in V7.5.1 Fix Pack 1.

If a value is not explicitly defined, the default value is 25. In this case, the value had been set to 50. Upon reducing the value, the memory consumption decreased. In Version 7.5.1 Fix Pack 1, this value can be found in the teamworksrunningconfig.xml file.

How to make the change if the fix has been applied or you are using an IBM Business Process Manager version that includes the fix:

Copy the following XML and add it to the 100Custom.xml file under the <properties> tag. Replace the My_New_Environment value with a value that is appropriate for your environment.

Note: In the previous file paths, change the variables in italics, such as cell_name, node_name, and server_name, to the values that are specific to your environment.

After making the changes to the 100Custom.xml file in the deployment manager profile, make sure that the changes are applied to the nodes by doing a force synchronize and restarting the deployment manager.

Further information regarding the .xml configuration files in IBM Business Process Manager:

In summary, if you are having issues with WSDL-related caching for IBM Business Process Manager V7.5.1 Fix Pack 1, check the value of the <wsdl-cache-size> parameter. If you are migrating from a previous version where this fix was applied, the value might have been previously defined. On prior versions, apply APAR JR42697 to take advantage of the cache.

Nathan Bost is a member of the IBM Business Process Manager Level 2 Support Team and is based in Raleigh, North Carolina USA.

If you have any comments about this information, you can submit them below this blog. We welcome comments!